Sergei Eisenstein’s October – “Propaganda for True Believers”

A Final Look At Who Won The Third Democratic Debate

We partnered with Ipsos to poll voters before and after the candidates took the stage.

If something is going to shake up the race before the Iowa caucuses, it’s likely to be a debate. So we partnered with Ipsos to once again track how Thursday’s debate, hosted by ABC News, affected likely primary voters’ feelings about the candidates. The FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, conducted using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, interviewed the same group of voters twice to capture both the “before” and “after” picture of the debate.

POST-DEBATE REACTIONS

The over- (and under-) performers

How favorably all likely primary voters felt about each candidate before the debate vs. how well respondents who watched the debate thought each candidate did

To better understand which candidates did well or poorly Thursday night, we plotted how favorably respondents rated the candidates before the debate vs. how debate-watchers rated their performance. Warren was one of the better-liked candidates going into the debate, but her performance was still rated higher than we’d expect based on her favorability alone. The same was true of Booker, Buttigieg and (especially) O’Rourke. Interestingly, Klobuchar didn’t get a great debate rating, but it’s not bad considering her pre-debate favorability, which was pretty neutral. Biden and Sanders are very popular with Democrats but failed to get correspondingly high scores on their debate performance, while Castro stands out for getting the worst debate grade — even considering his relatively lukewarm favorability rating going in.

The field may be shrinking, but many voters are still considering multiple candidates. Overall, we didn’t see huge shifts in the wake of the third debate, but there was some movement. Warren got the biggest increase — 2.4 percentage points — in the share of likely Democratic primary voters who are considering supporting her. Buttigieg and Klobuchar each gained a little over a point in potential support — 1.5 points for him and 1.3 points for her. Harris, meanwhile, saw the biggest drop in potential supporters, declining 2.5 points. Biden’s support barely budged; neither did O’Rourke’s, even though the former representative got positive marks for his performance.

Who voters think can beat Trump

Respondents’ estimates of the likelihood, from 0 percent (impossible) to 100 percent (certain), that each candidate would beat Trump

Joe Biden

Bernie Sanders

20400%100%

Elizabeth Warren

20400%100%

Kamala Harris

20400%100%

Beto O’Rourke

20400%100%

Pete Buttigieg

20400%100%

Cory Booker

20400%100%

Julián Castro

20400%100%

Amy Klobuchar

20400%100%

Andrew Yang

20400%100%

We also asked respondents to estimate each Democrat’s chances of defeating President Trump — from 0 percent to 100 percent. Polls show Democratic primary voters are prioritizing “electability,” but who do they think is electable? As you can see in the chart above, Klobuchar, who had one of the lower average scores going into the debate, saw fewer respondents say she had zero chance of defeating Trump. Buttigieg likewise had fewer people rate him as having no chance. Biden and Sanders, meanwhile, saw a small drop in the share of respondents who said they were certain those candidates would beat Trump.

Respondents’ average rating of candidates’ chances vs. Trump

CANDIDATE

PRE-DEBATE AVERAGE

POST-DEBATE AVERAGE

DIFF

Joe Biden

68.3

67.4

-0.9

Bernie Sanders

55.7

55.0

-0.7

Elizabeth Warren

51.4

53.0

+1.6

Kamala Harris

40.2

40.4

+0.2

Beto O’Rourke

33.6

34.9

+1.3

Pete Buttigieg

33.4

34.3

+0.8

Cory Booker

32.0

33.2

+1.2

Julián Castro

25.4

26.1

+0.8

Amy Klobuchar

23.3

25.3

+2.1

Andrew Yang

23.1

24.5

+1.4

There wasn’t much movement in respondents’ average estimates of how likely each candidate would be to defeat Trump in the general election. Most candidates saw their average likelihood increase, but only marginally. Klobuchar saw the largest bump, 2.1 percentage points, followed by Warren and Yang.

Unfavorable

Favorable

Before debate

After debate

Joe Biden

69.1%

23.4%

70.7%

23.6%

Bernie Sanders

68.0%

24.0%

69.0%

24.7%

Elizabeth Warren

63.8%

15.3%

68.5%

15.6%

Kamala Harris

51.8%

20.4%

55.1%

22.6%

Pete Buttigieg

43.9%

11.7%

49.4%

13.6%

Beto O’Rourke

43.2%

19.3%

49.8%

18.6%

Cory Booker

42.7%

16.0%

48.2%

18.8%

Julián Castro

32.2%

12.4%

33.0%

23.4%

Andrew Yang

28.4%

13.6%

34.9%

20.4%

Amy Klobuchar

25.1%

17.0%

32.4%

20.6%

We asked likely Democratic primary voters how favorably they felt about each candidate both before and after the debate. As you can see, among the polling front-runners, Biden and Sanders’s favorability ratings remained relatively unchanged, while Warren’s net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) jumped by a little over 4 points. In fact, only O’Rourke fared better than Warren; his net favorability rating increased a little over 7 points. But not all candidates made a positive impression. Castro’s net favorability, for instance, dropped by 10 points this time, after getting a big boost in the first debate.

Notes on the methodology: All the data presented here comes from polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. population. For this study, the same group of respondents is interviewed before and after the debate to track whether and how their answers changed. An initial wave of polling was conducted before the debates began, with a follow-up wave after the debate. The first wave of the poll was conducted from Sept. 5 to Sept. 11 among a general population sample of adults, with 4,320 respondents who say they are likely to vote in their state’s Democratic primary or caucus. For the likely Democratic primary voter subset of respondents, the poll has a margin of error of +/- 1.68 percentage points.

The second wave of the poll was conducted from Sept. 12 to Sept. 16 among 3,473 of the likely Democratic primary voters who previously responded to the first wave; it has a margin of error of +/- 1.89 percentage points. Of those respondents, 1,465 watched the debate.

The scatter plot comparing candidates’ favorability to their debate performance was calculated by assigning a 0 to 100 score to each respondent’s answer to the favorability question, where “very favorable” is equal to 100, “somewhat favorable” is equal to 75, “heard of, no opinion” is equal to 50, “somewhat unfavorable” is equal to 25 and “very unfavorable” is equal to zero. Scores were then averaged to create an overall favorability index for each candidate. Respondents who hadn’t heard of the candidate were not included.